• In 2010, Chinese agencies stepped up "birth tourism" packages for rich pregnant women to book vacations in America timed to their due dates -- to exploit the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of citizenship to anyone born here and thus giving the Chinese children future competitive advantages against non-Americans who must apply for U.S. visas.

A September USA Today report indicated that more Chinese mothers now prefer to land in the U.S. territory of Northern Mariana Islands (where birth also bestows citizenship), to the consternation of Islands officials, who would prefer traditional Chinese tourists instead of the "birthers."

(Historians agree that the 14th Amendment birth right was aimed at assuring citizenship for freed slaves.) [USA Today, 9-10-2013]

• The family of the great Native American Olympic athlete and Oklahoma native Jim Thorpe (1888-1953) was so disappointed that the then-governor of Oklahoma would not properly honor Thorpe on his death that one faction of his family moved the body to Pennsylvania, where he had no discernible ties but where municipal officials eagerly offered to name a town after him.

Since then, Jim Thorpe, Pa. (current population, 4,800), has withstood legal challenges seeking to return the body to Oklahoma, including a recent federal court decision upholding the entire town as a Native American "museum."

One grandson said that Thorpe spoke to him at a sweat lodge in Texas in 2010, telling him to leave the body in Jim Thorpe, with "no more pain created in my name." [Associated Press via NBC News, 9-5-2013]